Okolie: A big court presence

By BRIAN FREEMAN Sports ReporterPublished December 20, 2012 - 7:50am

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Football injury turned Rainmen reserve back to basketball

Halifax Rainmen’s Quincy Okolie, who played football at the University of South Florida, is making his mark on the basketball court. Okolie relaxes after practice at the University of King’s College on Wednesday. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)

CUT BY HIS high school hoops team, there was a time when Quincy Okolie thought scoring touchdowns, not baskets, might be his ticket to the pros.

These days, Okolie patrols the low post for the Halifax Rainmen in the National Basketball League of Canada, taking advantage of a seven-foot-five wingspan and a 40-inch vertical jump to make his presence felt near the rim.

Those same attributes helped him land a spot on the University of South Florida Bulls football team as a camp walk-on, first as a tight end and then as a speed rusher on the defensive line.

But in 2008 fate intervened and pointed him back to the hardwood.

After he suffered a neck injury in a helmet-to-helmet collision, doctors advised him that it probably wasn’t safe for him to play football again. For a while, he feared athletic endeavours of any kind might be over.

“There was definitely that thought,” Okolie, now 24, said in a recent interview.

“But I knew that if I applied my mind to anything else the way I applied myself to football that I would find success.

“My thoughts at the time were really just ‘Stay strong, everything happens for a reason, just find my path, you know, just find the next way to go.’”

The path led the six-foot-eight native of Kendall, in Miami-Dade County, Fla., to the basketball court, first at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, then to Northwood University in West Palm Beach and finally to the professional ranks.

Okolie made his pro debut in Germany earlier this year before earning a job with the Rainmen in the fall. A dual citizen whose mother hails from Montreal, he’s one of the team’s trio of Canadian players in a league that requires each club to carry at least three Canucks.

Not so long ago, a professional career seemed like quite a stretch. He was cut from a tryout with the Palm Beach Central High basketball team and played just one year of high school football.

“There was a summer I grew six inches and my body was very unco-ordinated so I had a lot of high school coaches tell me that athletics wouldn’t be possible for me,” he recalled with a chuckle.

“But once I started to develop into my frame, I started to realize that I could do some things that people thought I couldn’t do and that I thought I couldn’t do.”

He played in eight games in 2007 as a Bulls receiver and snagged a 19-yard reception in a Sun Bowl loss to the Oregon Ducks, then was converted to defensive end in the spring before the neck injury that cut short his football aspirations.

Employed by the Rainmen as a backup centre or power forward, Okolie averages 3.4 points per outing. On a team with plenty of offensive weapons, he knows that’s not what coach Rob Spon wants when he’s summoned from the bench.

“My role on the team is to help us win, to rebound and block shots and play defence at a very high intensity,” Okolie said.

Although he plays just 13.3 minutes a night, second-lowest on the team, he rarely goes unnoticed, particularly by opponents driving to the hoop.

His 14 blocked shots are sixth-best in the league — in a Nov. 3 game in London, he rejected three shots within a span of 90 seconds — and he’s third on the Rainmen in fouls and fifth in rebounds.

His limited playing time disguises his productivity in those areas. When he’s on the floor, he pulls down a rebound every two minutes 45 seconds, by far the highest rate among Rainmen.

In fact, Okolie’s rate of rebounds and blocks per 48 minutes is better than that of Moncton’s Sylvania Watkins, the league leader in both categories.

RAINDROPS: The Rainmen (7-7) host Summerside (8-7) on Friday night, looking to avenge Sunday’s embarrassing 23-point loss to the Storm that was the worst in franchise history at home. They’re in Moncton to face the Miracles (8-9) in a Sunday matinee and travel to Summerside on Wednesday night for another date with the Storm. … Cliff Levingston, dismissed as Halifax’s head coach after a 2-3 start, was hired Tuesday to guide the Rochester RazorSharks of the Premier Basketball League.